New collaborative writing tool...

[jason]

I've been asked to design a tool that will allow people to collaboratively write real time over the internet. Two or more people can edit the same document in real time. Simultaneously! What do you think that the requirements/abilities should be? How could it be used by ECE students?

Comments

[carolyn-c.livejournal.com]

Hahah jason silly Question but what is real time?

[complicittheory.livejournal.com]

Not silly. There are two ways of doing things online: asynchronous and syncrhonous.

Synchronous == real time... chatting, video conferencing, audio over the internet are all synchronous. Synchronous requires two people to be at the same place at the same time.

Asynchronous == not-real time... email, web pages, watching a movie.

make sense?

ECE use?

[jaguarxkr.livejournal.com]

Jason,
I like the idea of using editing over the Internet, especially for educators. This tool would have been helpful in first year when we had so many group projects to do, and everyone in our group lived all across the GTA. Doing something like a presentation along with a using a phone (because I still think that's an important feature) would work really well for major assignments. Everyone would be able to comply a report together, go through it as a group- all without going into a "physical space". My concern as mentioned before, is other people "pinching" work that isn't their's. How would you be able to maintain security with a tool such as this?? And how about someone who would want to write over your work? Would it work much like live-journals where you have to login on as a user?